I was in an antique store recently and came across a book called The Best of Life. It was a book of photography, published in 1973, containing the most significant pictures of the 20th century, even though the century still had 27 years left in it. The book was free for subscribing to Time magazine, which my parents did, and so it was delivered one morning in 1973 by Kenny White, our mailman, who was delivering the same big, heavy book to just about every house in Danville and consequently hated Time magazine.
I was fascinated by the book and pored over the pictures, including one of a nine-year-old South Vietnamese girl named Kim Phúc, running naked down a road in the village of Trảng Bàng, South Vietnam, after the South Vietnamese Air Force unleashed a napalm attack on one of its villages. The picture was taken in 1972 and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. I was 11 when I first saw that photograph and Kim Phúc was 9, the same age as my little brother. There were other children in the picture, running alongside her, terrified, crying, and holding hands, helping one another escape the flames. I didn’t know the word for it, being only 11, but I think that is when I became a pacifist, when I realized for the first time that war was not an exciting, grand adventure that turned boys into men, but was rather the organized governmental abuse of children that kept so many boys from ever becoming men and so many girls from ever becoming women.
We find ourselves now in the midst of yet another war, so have been reflecting on why war is not the answer, but the problem. We began by saying that in the United States, and many other countries, war is an enticing elixir, our national drug of choice, an addiction we seem unable and unwilling to break. Its casualties include not only those killed on the battlefield, but also those who knew and loved them. We’ve said war is the reason we can’t have nice things. It is the reason we lack universal healthcare, universal education, and universal childcare. It is the reason our infrastructure is in ruins. It is a destroyer of democracy, started by the wealthy and powerful, but always at the expense of the poor and powerless.
Today, as we celebrate our graduates, as we consider what they are owed by a healthy society, and what they owe in return, which is the same obligation each of us owe–to leave this earth better than we found it. As we contemplate those things, I want to say that war, by its very nature, contradicts that obligation. For war is never about the betterment and enrichment of our children, but is always about their destruction. War is nothing less than the organized abuse of children. If any individual did to children what war does to children, we would imprison them for life. War makes it possible for nations to perform acts of such barbarity and cruelty against children, it would be unthinkable if done by individuals. Were we to define child abuse as an act by a parent or caregiver that results in or risks serious harm to a child, we would have to conclude that war is designed to do exactly that.
Whenever and wherever war is waged, serious harm is done to children, and for that reason alone should be treated as the crime it is.
War is naked, burning children fleeing their flattened homes.
War is the collapse of healthcare and education systems, leaving children vulnerable to disease, ignorance, and abuse.
War is the separation of children from their parents, leaving them at great risk of sex-trafficking and exploitation.
War is the recruitment of children and young people to fight and kill the children and young people of other nations.
War is the violence that creates long-term post-traumatic-stress disorder, life-long depression, and disabling anxiety.
War is the abuse of children at the hands of adults who would never dream of harming their own children, but remain blind to the harm they cause the children of others.
I have a relative who married a young man who joined the Army just before we invaded Iraq in 2003. He had grown up in a small town, had come of age after 9/11, was told Iraq was to blame, and thought it his duty to defend his country. He was sent to Iraq one time, then a second time, and a third time, returning home each time more broken, until finally his marriage and life collapsed at the age of 22, just as his peers were graduating from college. As I was watching this unfold, I had no idea of the demons he faced, so blamed him for his family’s dissolution, when all along it was the fault of war.
I was talking about it with another relative, who mentioned the young man had entered an Iraqi village one day that had just been bombed and found small children huddled together, crying for their parents who’d been killed, and thought of his little daughter back in America, fell apart, and has been broken ever since.
Children are the first victims of war. We can talk all we want about smart bombs and precision targeting, but those are myths we tell ourselves to hide the cruel reality of war. I am no admirer of Pete Hegseth, but when he rechristened the Department of Defense the Department of War, he was making plain what has been obvious for so long—that we are a warrior nation, that we will fight at the slightest provocation, at threats real and imagined, but mostly imagined. We have spent 235 years of our 250 years at war. And every single time, children were the first victims.
What we do here this morning is what we must learn to do as a nation, to nurture and celebrate our children and youth, to provide our children and the children of the world a future of peace and goodwill. If America were great, this is what America would do.